Elena Pavan is Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. She holds a degree in Communication Sciences (University of Padova, Italy, 2004) and a PhD in Sociology (University of Trento, 2009). Her most recent research interests pertain to the relationships between collective action/political participation and digital media use. Within this area, she is working interdisciplinary combining technical and social knowledge as well as traditional qualitative and quantitative research methods with digital methods and big data approaches.

Arianna Mainardi
Scuola Normale Superiore Italy

Arianna Mainardi is a postdoctoral Researcher Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS). She holds a PhD in Information Society (Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca). She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and at the Centre d’Analyses et d’Intervention Sociologique (CADIS), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). At SNS, she has been involved in the project “MAKERS – Movements as knowledge producers in the digital age”. Her research interests include Gender and Tech, Body & Sex, Digital culture, Social Research Methods, and Political Participation.

Abstract

This article aims to achieve a better understanding of how online networks contribute to the organization and the symbolic production of social movements using big data coming from social media platforms. It traces and compares online social and semantic networks that emerged on Twitter during two protest events organized by the feminist Italian movement Non Una Di Meno (NUDM) – a national strike organized on March 8th, 2017 and a march organized on November 25th of the same year. Our results suggests that, over time, online networks created on Twitter remain sparse and centralized around the movement handle but that they continue to host an interactive dialogue between the movement, its activists, and supporters. Also, over time, participants to online conversations around NUDM tend to use Twitter to discuss different aspects of the mobilization – paying more attention to the spaces of the pro-test during the strike and to the issue of gender-based violence in November.

Crossley A. D. (2015), Facebook Feminism: Social Media, Blogs, and New Technologies of Contemporary U.S. Feminism, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 20(2): 253-268.

della Porta D., A. Mattoni (2015), “Social Networking Sites in Pro-democracy and Anti-austerity Protests: Some Thoughts from a Social Movement Perspective”, in D. Trottier and C. Fuchs (eds.), Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Routledge: London, pp. 39–65.